Abstract
The article deals with questions related to the rhythm of French and Czech rap music from a phonetic perspective. The hip-hop music productions are compared through features triggered by the musical meter and rappers' skills, while the genre's progress is outlined.
A perceptual method is used to examine hierarchised musical prominences and the syllabation, both represented with abstract metrical grids. In order to address the mapping of an underlying steady beat and a variable syllable flow, a text corpus is analysed.
It contains excerpts from 100 songs (50 in each language), based on the rappers' popularity and covering the time gap from 1981- 2013 equally. As a result, French and Czech rap are shown to resemble each other closely in many aspects: filling up of the grid (syllables/measure), musical tempo (bpm), and speech rate (syllables/second); neither language has the two latter correlated.
Strikingly similar tendencies also define their syncopations (linguistically empty strong beats), rhyme coefficients (relative number of syllables involved), line grouping in lyrics (edge-oriented boundary signals). Many triplets (quick bursts of syllables) are found, and language-specific criteria suggest a great deal of unusual accentual phrases.
The figures shown on a timescale reveal the music's growth, allowing in turn to refine future research goals (half-sung intonation, stress patterns, comparison with reggae/dancehall flow).